1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and a method in which a processing liquid is supplied to a substrate from a processing nozzle situated above the substrate to process the substrate, and particularly to a substrate processing system and a method of substrate processing that make it possible to prevent unintended dripping of a processing liquid from a processing nozzle.
The present invention also relates to a program storage medium in which is stored a program for executing a method of substrate processing in which a processing liquid is supplied to a substrate from a processing nozzle situated above the substrate to process the substrate, the method being advantageous in that the method makes it possible to prevent unintended dripping of the processing liquid from the processing nozzle.
2. Description of Related Art
There have so far been known a system and a method in which a processing liquid is supplied to a substrate from a processing nozzle situated above the substrate to process the substrate.
Further, there have also been proposed recently a system and a method in which a two-fluid nozzle is used as a processing nozzle to jet a mixture of a processing liquid and a gas to a substrate so as to clean the substrate (e.g., Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 168670/2003). If a two-fluid nozzle is used, there can be obtained not only the chemical cleaning action of a processing liquid, but also the physical cleaning action produced by a collision pressure created by the collision of fluids with a substrate. An excellent cleaning effect can therefore be expected from such a substrate cleaning system.
In the above-described substrate processing, a processing liquid sometimes drips unfavorably from a processing nozzle and from a surrounding of the processing nozzle on a substrate when the substrate is processed after processing the previous one.
Such dripping of a processing liquid readily occurs particularly in a substrate processing system using a two-fluid nozzle as the processing nozzle. The first reason for this is that the processing liquid collides with a substrate and curls up so as to produce droplets, which are apt to stick to the processing nozzle and to the surrounding of the processing nozzle. The second reason is as follows: in order to meet the strong demand for a smaller-sized substrate processing system in recent years, a processing nozzle and a substrate to be processed have come to be positioned more closely to each other than ever; consequently, the droplets of the processing liquid, which have collided with the substrate and have curled up, reach to and stick to the processing nozzle and the surrounding of the processing nozzle more frequently.
If such droplets of a processing liquid fall on a substrate, the substrate may unfavorably have water marks.